Crontab for different ime zones

[Tim Judd]

On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 5:31 PM, GT <catch.all at marketmentat.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 2009-05-23 at 23:41 -0600, Tim Judd wrote:
>
> > <SNIP>
> >
> >
> >
> > I propose the following:
> >   cron itself has no concept of timezone.  it is 'date' that is picking
> up
> > TZ and reporting as such.  Cron's job is so simple is that it wakes up
> each
> > minute to see if it has work to do, regardless of timezone, or anything
> > else.
> >
>
> Yep - I understood that, Tim.
>
> Thew issue seems to be that cron pays no attention to TZ declarations
> that happen AFTER it wakes up - cron does not parse the job times using
> the new TZ.
>
> The thing I am struggling with is that 'date' picks up the changes
> imposed by 'TZ=', but then 'cron' parses the next line as if the job
> times are interpreted using the server's default TZ.
>
> I've tried using 'CRON_TZ=' as well as, and instead of, 'TZ=' - to no
> avail.
>
>
> What I thought ought to happen is this:
>
> *  'cron' wakes up;
> *  'cron' works through the crontab line by line;
> *  at line 1 cron changes the TZ to America/NY;
> *  at line 2 cron reads the job time in the context of having just been
> told that it's operating in the NY timezone (thus 45 13 * * * is 1:45 pm
> NY time);
> .
> .
> .
> * at line 15 cron is told to change the TZ to Australia/Sydney;
> * from line 14 onwards, 45 13 * * * is 1:45 pm SYDNEY time.
> .
> .
> .
> and so on.
>
>
>
> It seems that cron behaves as if it forgets $TZ at each newline within a
> given cron instance.
>
> The silly thing is, with all the time I've wasted pursuing this wild
> goose I could have built the required four crontabs, and written the
> script to swap them in and out on the appropriate dates.
>
> (Or I could have spent $100 and bought a shared-hosted server space to
> do the Australian-TZ stuff and given it sufficent permission to store
> the resultant data in y primary mySQL db...)
>
> Still, I think it's worth persevering with. I'm certain it can be done.
>
> > You might want to try some other determining factor, such as a shell
> > builtin.
> >
> >
> > Good luck.
>
> Cheers
>


How about a jail for America/NY, and a jail for AU/Sydney?  that might work.


--TJ